Class Pictures: Representations of race, gender and ability in a century of school photography

Abstract

This paper examines photographs taken of American public school classes between the 1880's and the 1940's. Most of the images were found in two virtual archives: The American Memory site at the Library of Congress and The National Archives and Record Center. These large photograph collections were searched for representations of race, gender, and physical ability. The photographs were compared and contrasted and analyzed for elements of hidden curricula using techniques drawn from the social sciences and humanities. It was found that these photo collections have significant gaps and historical amnesias. Collections made under conditions of racial segregation are themselves segregated and continue to reproduce images of hierarchy and dominance. To the extent these sites function as important resources for teachers and students searching for primary source documents for history and social studies projects, the archives convey significantly biased views of the history of education and minority groups in America.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 77 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.